El-Said Badawi (El-Saʿīd Muḥammad Badawī) () was a scholar and linguist and author of many works, both in English and in Arabic, dealing with various aspects of the Arabic language.
Having learned the Qur'an by the age of ten in his village, El-Nakhas, Sharqiyya Governorate, he attended
Al-Azhar University for his secondary schooling. He received a B.A. in Arabic Language & Literature and Islamic Studies from
Cairo University
Cairo University ( ar, جامعة القاهرة, Jāmi‘a al-Qāhira), also known as the Egyptian University from 1908 to 1940, and King Fuad I University and Fu'ād al-Awwal University from 1940 to 1952, is Egypt's premier public university ...
, an M.A. in General Linguistics and Phonetics from the University of London, and his Ph.D. in Experimental Phonetics from the University of London.
After obtaining his Ph.D. Badawi briefly taught linguistics at the University of Cairo, then began teaching Arabic literature and linguistics at
Omdurman University in
Sudan, and moved to the
American University in Cairo in 1969, where he became the Curriculum Advisor for the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) in 1970.
Badawi's wide-ranging interests included colloquial
Egyptian Arabic
Egyptian Arabic, locally known as Colloquial Egyptian ( ar, العامية المصرية, ), or simply Masri (also Masry) (), is the most widely spoken vernacular Arabic dialect in Egypt. It is part of the Afro-Asiatic language family, and ...
,
classical Arabic as found in the Qur'an, and the teaching of Arabic as a foreign language. In the field of sociolinguistics, perhaps Badawi's best known work is ''Mustawayāt al-ʻArabīyah al-muʻāṣirah fī Miṣr'' (''Levels of Contemporary Arabic in Egypt'') wherein he challenges the traditional simplistic dichotomy of Classical and Colloquial Arabic, proposing instead a more subtle analysis involving several levels of usage.
[''see also'' Sayahi, Lotfi (2014]
Diglossia and Language Contact: Language Variation and Change in North Africa
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . Pages 59-60. ''and'' Paulson, Christina (1988
International Handbook of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education
New York: Greenwood Press. . Pages 52-53.
Works
English
*An intonational study of colloquial Riyadhi Arabic. 1965 (''Ph.D. thesis'')
*A comprehensive study of Egyptian Arabic. 1978 (''coauthored with E.T. Abdel-Massih et al.'')
*A reference grammar of Egyptian Arabic. 1979 (''coauthored with E.T. Abdel-Massih et al.'')
*A comprehensive study of Egyptian Arabic 2. Proverbs and metaphoric expressions 1981 (''coauthored with E.T. Abdel-Massih et al.'')
*A dictionary of Egyptian Arabic : Arabic-English. 1986 (''coauthored with M. Hinds'')
*Sultan Qaboos encyclopedia of Arab names 2, Treasury of Arab Names, in four volumes. 1991 (''coauthored with M. Al-Zubair'')
*Modern written Arabic : a comprehensive grammar. 2002
*Arabic-English dictionary of Qur'anic usage. 2007
Arabic
*Mustawayāt al-ʻArabīyah al-muʻāṣirah fī Miṣr : baḥth fī ʻalāqat al-lughah bi-al-ḥaḍārah. 1973
*Muʻjam asmāʼ al-ʻArab. 1991
*Dalīl aʻlām ʻUmān. 1991
*al-Kitāb al-asāsī fī taʻlīm al-lughah al-ʻArabīyah li-ghayr al-nāṭiqīn bi-hā. 2006
*Buḥūth lughawīyah wa-tarbawīyah fī qaḍāyā al-ʻArabīyah al-muʻāṣirah wa-mushkilātihā. 2015
External links
Arabic-English Dictionary of Qur'anic Usage*
A Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic: Arabic - English
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Badawi, El-Said
Egyptian linguists
Egyptian philologists
Arab grammarians
Sociolinguists
Dialectologists
20th-century linguists
21st-century linguists
1929 births
2014 deaths
People from Zagazig
Al-Azhar University alumni
Cairo University alumni
Alumni of the University of London